DAY 21

The Personal & Universal.

Soylent is great for efficiency, but terrible for passion.

There’s a strong community of DIYers, but I’ve had few shared experiences while drinking the stuff over the last 3 weeks. While I haven’t really participated in the forums, that platform seems more like a shared meta-experience: a highway of practical knowledge, a love for data, a desire for hyper-personalization that can only be quantified (if at all) over the long term.

Maybe that’s what bugs me. Soylent is, at it’s core, a personal experience. You make it yourself, for you along to consume. You don’t have a dinner party and serve Soylent. You don’t surprise your mom on Mother’s day with a Soylent shake. It doesn’t make for a great date night.

After living the Soylent lifestyle, it seems paradoxical that the experience would be a universal one; but as the maxim states, the idiosyncratic details of life are exactly those things which make stories so believable.

No matter how foreign they are to the reader, the minute details are relatable: The irritating way in which the shower curtain extends almost to the wall — allowing water to splash on the toilet and the drywall; the way you find yourself on the wikipedia page for the extinct-in-the-wild Barbary Lion when you only opened up Google Chrome to check what time Chick-fil-a opens on Wednesday; or the way you try and carefully rip open up the foil packet of Soylent and fold the edges into your pitcher with precision so that none of the precious, white calories spill on the counter or float away in a puff of smoke.

These peculiar & personal moments are not just experienced by one person. By engaging multiple senses in reading them alone, you’ve actually experienced them too. In the brain, perception is reality.

You probably haven’t tried Soylent yet. But you already know what it feels like.